"Every means in his power. . . I indignantly refused"
Ida Wells refuses to give up her seat -- in 1883

In America today, just about every student learns about how Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in 1955, signaling the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott. But Parks was by not the first African-American woman who refused to give up her seat because of her color, and she wasn't the first to end up in a legal case because of it. Seventy-one years earlier a Memphis woman named Ida Wells did something very similar on a train leaving Memphis. Wells left two first-person accounts of the event: the testimony in her legal case (Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad v. Wells) and in her autobiography. Here are both accounts:
Ida Wells
Her verbal legal testimony:

“I returned to my seat in the rear car. There were only two passenger cars in the train, two passenger cars, and one baggage car. I saw a drunken white man in the front coach.

"I had before this time ridden in said rear car, once about July 1883. Rougher people ride in the front car than in the rear car. There was no person on the seat with me and I was the only colored person in that car. The car was not crowded.

"When a mile or so from Memphis, the conductor came collecting tickets. He took mine, looked at me, and returned it to me, saying he could not accept it in that car, and passed on. I was reading a newspaper at the time.

"Directly the conductor returned to me and said that I would have to go to the coach in front, that I was in the wrong car. That he had the rear car for white people alone, and that colored people must ride in the forward coach.

"To this I replied that I would not ride in the forward car, that I had a seat and intended to keep it. He said to me that he would treat me like a lady, but that I must go into the other car, and, I replied that if he wished to treat me like a lady, he would leave me alone.

"When we reached Frazier, the first station, the train stopped and the conductor again came to me and said he would again ask me politely to go into the other car, and I refused to do so. He then took hold of me to carry me to the other car. I resisted him – holding onto my seat – when he called for help, and two white passengers helped him to carry me out.

"I resisted all the time and never consented to do. My dress was torn in the struggle, my sleeve almost torn off. Everybody in the car seemed to sympathize with the conductor and were against me. The conductor had carried my bag and parasole etc into the forward coach before carrying me out, and when they got me onto the platform between the cars, I got off the train refusing to go into the forward coach. The conductor asked me not to get off, but I said that I would not ride in the forward coach."

Ida Wells
PHOTO: University of Chicago library
An excerpt from Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells:

"I secured a school in Shelby County, Tennessee, which paid a better salary, and began studying for the examination for city schoolteacher which meant an even larger increase in salary. One day while riding back to my school, I took a seat in the ladies' coach of the train as usual. There were no jim crow cars then. But ever since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the United States Supreme Court in 1877 there had been efforts all over the South to draw the color line on the railroads.

"When the train started and the conductor came along to collect tickets, he took my ticket, then handed it back to me and told me that he couldn't take my ticket there. I thought that if he didn't want the ticket I wouldn't bother about it so went on reading. In a little while when he finished taking tickets, he came back and told me I would have to go in the other car. I refused, saying that the forward car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies car I proposed to stay. He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.
A Chicago Tribune article about Ida Wells' case
"I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggage-man and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out. They were encouraged to do this by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car; some of them even stood on the seats so they could get a good view and continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand.

"By this time the train had stopped at the first station. When I saw that they were determined to drag me into the smoker, which was already filled with colored people and those who were smoking, I said I would get off the train rather than go in -- which I did. Strangely, I held onto my ticket all this time, although the sleeves of my linen duster had been torn out and I had been pretty roughly handled, I had not been hurt physically.

"I went back to Memphis and engaged a colored lawyer to bring suit against the railroad for me. After months of delay I found he had been bought off by the [rail] road, and as he was the only colored lawyer in town I had to get a white one. This man, Judge Greer, kept his pledge with me and the case was finally brought to trial in the circuit court. Judge Pierce, who was an ex-union soldier from Minnesota, awarded me damages of five hundred dollars. I can still see the headlines in the Memphis Appeal announcing 'Darky Damsel Gets Damages.'
"The railroad appealed the case to the state's supreme court, which reversed the findings of the lower court, and I had to pay the costs. Before this was done, the railroad's lawyer had tried every means in his power to get me to compromise the case, but I indignantly refused. Had I done so, I would have been a few hundred dollars to the good instead of having to pay out over two hundred dollars in court costs.

"It was twelve years afterward before I knew why the case had attracted so much attention and was fought so bitterly by Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. It was the first case in which a colored plaintiff in the South had appealed to a state court since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the United States Supreme Court. The gist of that decision was that Negroes not wards of the nation but citizens of the individual states, and should therefore appeal to the state courts for justice instead of to the federal courts. The success of my case would have set a precedent which others would doubtless have followed. In this, as in so many other matters, the South wanted the Civil Rights Bill repealed but did not want or intend to give justice to the Negro after robbing him of all his sources from which to secure it.

"The supreme court of the nation had told us to go to the state courts for redress of grievances; when I did so I was given the brand of justice Charles Sumner knew Negroes would get when he fathered the Civil Rights Bill during the Reconstruction period."
By the way, you should be able to buy a copy of Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells at your local bookstore or check one out of your local library.

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